Entertainment

Portfolio Sharing Site Dripbook Launches with Promotional Tools for Artists

Dripbook, a portfolio creation and sharing network for visual media artists, launched in beta late last year. Eight months later, Dripbook is emerging from beta, offering everyone the chance to request an invite to the service.

When I reviewed Dripbook during its beta phase last year, I noted the simplistic and easy-to-navigate design, and also appreciated some of the features that took an artist's time into consideration, such as the multiple file upload option that allowed you to perform other actions on the site while waiting for media to be uploaded into your portfolio. The biggest downfall of Dripbook, however, was its closed-wall architecture that made it difficult to share content beyond the Dripbook network, limiting the promotional and marketing capabilities of Dripbook as a service.

With the full release today, however, Dripbook has changed some of that, layering in sharing options as one of its main features presented to users and artists alike. Public portfolios can be shared across a handful of bookmarking and microblogging sites, and the URL is also provided so that you can direct others to the public portfolio as well. Dripbook also offers artists dynamic widgets and RSS feeds, as well as exporting options for a custom, Flash-based portfolio that can be shared across the Web.

Other new features include private messaging, genre blogs, and genre and geo-location based searches, all of which help nurture the community Dripbook is creating. The most important feature upgrades in my opinion are the sharing capabilities Dripbook has added, which are key to anyone's Web-based promotion across varied social media sites, especially if Dripbook (as is with most sites) isn't presenting a marketing kit for members to use to their advantage.

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